Kena: Bridge of Spirits Review (Xbox Series X|S)

Kena: Bridge of Spirits gives players a magical journey to embark on. Although the game starts off slow, it does end up delivering a memorable experience that is filled with cute forest creatures and a spirit guiding journey to restore balance over the land.

First things first, the Xbox Series X|S port of the game works great. In my playthrough of this game, I did not encounter any performance issues with the game. I played this on an Xbox Series X and performance was good. No crashes or bugs is always a good thing. The game is also quite technically impressive considering its humble independent beginnings. Let’s dive in.

Story

The story is centered around Kena, a young spirit guide who has magical abilities. Kena helps people who have remained between the physical and spirit realms. Players will quickly find themselves meeting other characters in the game, but figuring out what is happening in this world is a slow burn. In order to stay spoiler free, I will say the story starts off on a slow note.

The magic design and beautiful landscape surrounding the action carry the beginning hours of the game. Kena’s story is almost an undertone of the overarching themes of environmentalism, grief, and spiritualism. During the first section of the game, all that we learn is that Kena is headed to the mountain shrine. You guessed it, located at the top of a big snow-capped mountain. But as you progress through the game, the story begins to pick up toward the mid-way point and takes off from there. I found myself connecting more with the story. And for what it’s worth, I felt the ending gave the story a good closure.

Combat and gameplay

I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of combat in the game. Going into it, I did not know what to expect with how the game would play. I found the combat to be fun and engaging. Increasing difficulty does make the game more challenging, but the game still feels accessible enough on the “normal” difficulty. There were a couple of combat segments that I had to retry. Boss fights towards the end of the game did have some memorable set pieces and were challenging to defeat. Overall, the game was a bit on the easy side and I tried all the different difficulty settings throughout my play-through. One other note, the move sets in combat felt slightly stiff compared to higher budget games. Having said that, I still was impressed with the combat and the amount of combat segments that I encountered. The right pacing for combat and puzzle solving felt good as well.

A big part of the gameplay is also collecting little furry forest creatures called the Rot. They are adorable. Collecting these tiny creatures is not only a major part of the plot, it is also a leveling mechanic in itself, and allows the players to unlock great abilities used in combat, ranging from arrow abilities to new Rot mechanics. The Rot seem to befriend Kena in the beginning of the story and stick with her throughout the game as her companions. Finding more of them actually matters in-game. And as you find more of them, your team actually grows, and they follow you around when exploring the world, helping when needed by moving objects or destroying the evil veil called corruption.

The World

While I was expecting this to be a more linear experience, I was surprised to see how much exploration was involved. The game has its fair share of collectible hunting. Searching for currency to buy more hats for the adorable rots is a common activity. Also, the game has some upgrading and leveling that involves exploring and finding chests to open in order to obtain points towards these upgrades. Although puzzles weren’t too challenging, finding the treasure chest inside an abandoned house after finding your way inside was rewarding and kept pushing me to continue searching for more in order to grab all my upgrades.

The music in this game is also worth mentioning. The East Asian-inspired musical score chosen for this game fits the vibe the development team seems to be going for. Several variations when moving from exploration to combat and back as well as different areas of the game have different songs which makes the music almost essential to listen to when playing.

Restoring the Balance

I went into this game with no expectations. I felt continually impressed with what independent developers Ember Lab cooked up for players with Kena: Bridge of Spirits. What few misses there are, Ember Lab makes up for it with a bright and colorful creation, wrapped around some dark narrative moments. When the story picks up, players may find themselves wrapped up in a spiritual journey to restore balance to a broken and damaged world. I hope this game will be enjoyed by many.